Three Nights with a Scoundrel (Stud Club #3)(50)

“Then do begin.” She leaned forward, focusing intently on his mouth. “But slowly, please.”

“My mother …” He swallowed hard. “My mother was born completely deaf. She came from a very rural, isolated area of Kent where deafness is common. Her cousin was likewise without hearing.”

“How strange. All in one place? I wonder why that is.”

“You, and many scholars. It seems to pass through family lines. It’s so common, signing is like a second language there. For everyone, even the hearing.” He propped an elbow on the windowsill, relaxing into the tale. “Anyway, when my mother was a child, charity toward the deaf was all the rage. You’ve heard of Braidwood and his school?”

She nodded. “My own speech tutors were trained there.”

“His efforts were famous. He made it the fashionable thing to show charity toward the deaf and mute. My mother and her cousin were recruited for employment, offered posts in service here in Town as chambermaids to a wealthy lord’s family. The promised wages were an untold sum for two girls from the weald.”

“So they accepted?” Lily prompted.

“Yes. They took the posts. They were young and afraid, but they had each other’s company. At first. My mother’s cousin took ill and died within a few months of their arrival in London.”

“Oh, no. How tragic.”

“My mother’s lot was worse. She’d never learned to speak or write, knew no one in London. Her employers were older and decent enough, but there was a son and he … Well, he took advantage.” Bile rose in his throat. “Chambermaids are misused by their masters every day, but imagine her situation. She couldn’t fight him off. She couldn’t ask for help. Even if she had, it was doubtful she would have received it.”

Lily hugged herself. “What did she do?”

“She survived, as best she could. When the housekeeper finally saw she was pregnant, she was sacked without reference and tossed to the street. I came into the world a few months later. My mother gave birth to me in a vacant warehouse.”

“Alone?”

“She was afraid of asking for help. Thought her baby would be taken from her, and she’d end up in the workhouse or Bedlam. It wasn’t an unrealistic fear.”

“That was very brave of her.”

“Yes. Yes, it was.” He’d been a help to his mother when he grew older. But Julian knew at any time in his infancy, she could have made life a great deal easier on herself by dropping him on the doorstep of a foundling hospital. She hadn’t. They’d always had each other. Most times, that was all they’d had.

“Why didn’t she go home to her family?”

“She had no money, no means of travel. And she felt disgraced. Ashamed.” He took a slow, deep breath to calm himself. “That’s who I am, Lily. The product of fear, violence, and shame. The bastard son of a lecherous nobleman. Born on the wrong side of the blanket, on the wrong side of Town. Raised in conditions a gutter rat would fancy himself a cut above. We had nothing. No food. No home. No proper clothing. My mother worked when she could; I begged and stole when she couldn’t. The rest of the time, we starved.”

Like an ancient echo, hunger rumbled in his stomach. He’d eaten nothing since those few bites of beefsteak last night. Even before Leo’s murder, he’d done this often—skipping meals, sometimes for a day or more. He didn’t plan it so, but it was almost like he couldn’t allow himself to forget the sensation of hunger. That bitter, gnawing emptiness that had shadowed all his early years.

“When I was about nine years of age,” he went on, “I heard word of this place. A coffeehouse owned and entirely staffed by the deaf. I brought my mother around, and the owner—Anna’s late husband—gave her work as a scullery maid. I ran messages, shoveled coal.” His eyes went to the sloping ceiling. “They gave us this garret for our lodgings. I had a little cot, just there.” He pointed at the floorboards beneath her chair. “First real bed in my life. And at night, I lay down to it with a full belly. For the first time in years, my mother had steady work and friends with whom she could converse. She was happy. I was happy.

“It was only later, as I grew older, that I realized what advantages we should have had from the first, and what a toll those years of dire poverty had taken on my mother’s health. I finally came to understand the magnitude of suffering my fa—” He couldn’t use that word. “… the man who sired me had inflicted on her.”

“And on you, as well. Do you know who he was?”

He shook his head. “He’s dead. She told me that much, when I grew old enough to ask. The son died first, not long after I was born, leaving his father without an heir. When the old man died a few years later, the title passed to a distant relation. I gather my mother took me to the executor of the estate, hoping for a settlement.”

“I suppose she was denied one.”

He nodded.

“Julian …” Lily inched forward on her chair.

“Noblemen,” he said, ignoring her proffered sympathy, “came in to this coffeehouse every day. It was quite the fashionable meeting house, in its time. For years, I smoothed the creases from their newspapers, polished the buckles on their shoes, wiped their spit from the floor. And I watched my mother grow a little weaker every winter.”